As the toxic ash of Grenfell Tower’s vanity cladding falls over the neighbouring streets, we are left with the acrid truth in our throats: regeneration in the Royal Borough is in fact a crime of greed and selfishness. I took the refund. At the time, I felt uncomfortable with this decision and the ways in which I justified it to myself. And then I forgot about it, until the smoke drifting into my flat in the early hours of Wednesday woke me up. Today, I gave it back. It wasn’t ever mine to keep. I handed it over in cash to a vicar running a refuge for the victims of the fire in a local church. I explained that it was not a donation, not a charitable act, that it was guilt money and he was doing me a kindness by taking it off my hands.

If you live in Kensington and Chelsea, please, give your rebate back. But not to the council, which seems to have trouble in identifying those – “our residents” – who might actually need it.

"Speaking to RT some 2 hours after a white van rammed into pedestrians outside the Muslim Welfare House, which contains a mosque, Kozbar said, citing eyewitnesses that 'at least 10 people were lying on the ground', following what he said was 'a deliberate attack..."

The Grenfell Tower fire has further demonstrated the deep class division in the UK.

On Friday, working-class Londoners outraged at the loss of life in the Grenfell Tower fire – 30 confirmed dead and dozens missing — took to the streets. They heckled Prime Minister Theresa May, calling her a coward as she visited survivors, stormed a town hall and, as dusk approached, gathered outside the charred apartment block, demanding justice and accusing authorities of negligence. ...

A high-rise housing hundreds of families should not go up like a tinderbox, not anywhere and certainly not in an industrialized country with the best technology at its disposal. But the fire has exposed that in London, blocks apart, live two different worlds. ... “This is a tale of two cities,” Labour MP David Lammy told Channel 4 News. “This is what Dickens was writing about in the century before the last, and it’s still here in 2017. It’s the face of the poorest and most vulnerable.”

The Grenfell Tower is in North Kensington a district ranked among the 10% poorest in England. Completed in 1974, the 24-storey building provided subsidized council housing to roughly 600 people in 120 apartments. But it is not far from posh mansions that sell for millions of pounds, many bought by foreign owners who rarely inhabit them. In fact, overall the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea is London’s richest, and its less fortunate residents have long felt they were an afterthought. ...

Some have accused the borough of seeking to squeeze the poor out by failing to provide adequate housing. In 2015, a tenants’ rights group accused the borough of “social cleansing” when it proposed buying affordable housing for the poor outside city limits. John Elledge of the New Statesman reports that the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea was the worst in London and third worst in England in increasing its housing stock, adding just 1 percent between 2004 and 2014. ...

Authorities cannot say they weren’t warned. Last November the same group that accused the borough of social cleansing, the Grenfell Action Group, warned that apartment blocks in the neighbourhood were firetraps. They said residents had received no proper fire-safety instructions and were informed by a notice in the elevator to remain in their apartments in the event of a fire. “The Grenfell Action Group firmly believe that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord,” it wrote on its blog, warning later of “an incident that results in serious loss of life.” ...

The investigation of a 2016 apartment block fire found that foam inside cladding caught fire and fuelled the fire’s spread. London fire chiefs wrote to borough councils warning them of the danger, but nothing was done. Arnold Turling, a member of the Association of Specialist Fire Protection, said he warned a conference three years ago of the dangers of cladding that is not sufficiently fire retardant. He called the Grenfell fire “entirely avoidable.” ...

It is the sense of negligence, that the lives of the poor are not worthy of the same protection as the rich, that is fuelling the anger in London’s streets. Much of it has been directed at May, whose precarious hold on government after the June 8 election has been shaken further by the fire.

In an editorial this week, The Independent wrote that it is in London where the disparity between the country’s haves and have-nots is most pronounced. “When the dust settles, and the ash,” the newspaper wrote, “we must consider whether this tragedy is not only a personal nightmare for all who are directly affected but is also an emblem of a broken society.”

"Speaking to RT some 2 hours after a white van rammed into pedestrians outside the Muslim Welfare House, which contains a mosque, Kozbar said, citing eyewitnesses that 'at least 10 people were lying on the ground', following what he said was 'a deliberate attack..."

"A growing number of volunteers and residents who survived the Grenfell Tower fire in West London last week believe authorities and media are deliberately downplaying the true scale of fatalities and key details of the deadly inferno. On Monday, police confirmed 79 people are known to have died in the fire. Authorities have always said the figure could rise much higher, as the tower block was able to house up to 600 people."

(Tommy has been charged for his activities in the UK. Here in Canada, Meir Weinstein and the JDL seems to enjoy impunity no matter what he does. Not to mention ample financial support to continue his ultra-Zionist hatecrimes.)

That appears to be a right wing screed, on a site dedicated to supporting Brexit. It suggests that there is no relationship between government austerity policies and the Grenfell fire. 100% pure bullshit. Thanks a ton, NDPP.

While actually it is heartening to think that most of the Grenfell dead died in seconds rather than being burnt alive, it attests to gross negligence.

NDPP, that is bullshit, and a heinous insult for the many people here who have supported workplace, tenants', feminist, LGBT, homeless, migrant, racialised people, Indigenous and other struggles for years and in many cases decades. If I cried about Grenfell, Rana Plaza, Gaza, Syria and other places, it isn't because I like to see ordinary humans like me up shit's creek. It is simply because I'm seeing myself in their shoes (if they have shoes) and overcome by their pain.

Here in Québec, I took part in mass strikes and supported the Student Spring with the "casseroles" every evening. And the successful fight against the FTAA, won by protests from Québec to Argentina. Don't give us that insulting crap.

It’s the publication that puts the case for human endeavour, intellectual risk-taking, exploration, excellence in learning and art, and freedom of speech with no ifs and buts, against the myriad miserabilists who would seek to wrap humans in red tape, dampen down our daring, restrain our thoughts, and police our speech.

spiked is a fan of reason, liberty, progress, economic growth, choice, conviction and thought experiments about the future, and not so big on eco-miserabilism, identikit politicians, nostalgia, dumbing down and determinism.

Strange, the attacks on NDPP. NDPP generally just posts links that are actually relevant in the sense that most others just regurgitate the propaganda pieces we're already well aware of from our media. Far be it for me to judge the validity of NDPP's links but I'm quite aware that they have often been first to report truths later conceded by our compliant media. You don't need to agree with them, NDPP offers usually no opinion.

There's massive outrage for a couple of deaths by terrorists. (usually brainwashed and deranged) and not a peep from the same folk that fellow British are responsible for these deaths.

The article in question wasn't some fearless left-wing thunderclap against corporate power; it was the usual populist-right attack on supposed elitist leftists who(the story goes) don't really care about the poor; the whole "champagne socialist" schtick, though it doesn't actually use that phrase.

One of the things it DOES do is claim that it is "dehumanizing" for left-wingers to use words like "vulnerable" to describe the people victimized by conservative economic policies. Since a quick google shows that particular word used in that particular context times numerous times on babble, I guess we're supposed to take the lesson that the populist right has a lot to teach babblers about how to think about the poor?

How is it that Islam is the only religion on Earth with it's own 'phobes? Every other religion has "critics".

You're asking the wrong guy. I don't think of critics of Islam as "Islamophobes".

Quote:

Why is it homophobia and not dislike of gay people?

Lots of people have asked that... most of them right wingers. But I think it's a reasonable question. I don't really have an answer, but I will say it seems to me that "Islamophobe" and "Russophobe" were just attempts to coat-tail on "homophobe". I'd have been fine with "gay hater", FWIW. I think that casting them as fearful, rather than just hateful, was some kind of attempt to embarrass them, and then it stuck.

I do find this intersting. Does "phobe" embarass or excuse? I think sometimes it is an attempt to provide an explanation to rationalize what is irrational. I think a lot of bullies do not fear their targets at all. Hate can come from fear but I am not convinced that it always does. As well some of the people who fall into the "phobic" are just greedy and wanting to keep a power structure. oppression is not exclusively about fear, I think. I do not mean to diminish the role of fear but I do not think that it is reasonable to presume it to be the prime motivation in every case for expressions of hate.

The article in question wasn't some fearless left-wing thunderclap against corporate power; it was the usual populist-right attack on supposed elitist leftists who(the story goes) don't really care about the poor; the whole "champagne socialist" schtick, though it doesn't actually use that phrase.

One of the things it DOES do is claim that it is "dehumanizing" for left-wingers to use words like "vulnerable" to describe the people victimized by conservative economic policies. Since a quick google shows that particular word used in that particular context times numerous times on babble, I guess we're supposed to take the lesson that the populist right has a lot to teach babblers about how to think about the poor?

It is important that the "left" watch out for such criticism coming from the right. If the left is not getting significant criticism from right of centre sources it means it is not be effective. When the right criticizes the direction and tactics of the left, there is a fair indication that soemthing is working and a nerve is being hit.

When it comes to the fire being the more political, I would hope that things are seen that way as politics, which is about power, is the very cause of such avoidable tragedies that are not avoided only becuase a group with power wants to retain more wealth at the risk of others. Now, they are forced to no longer see this in terms of an acceptable risk but rather a demonstrateably predictable human cost. Small wonder rightists are defensive.

"Northern Ireland's hard-right Democratic Unionist Party is a 'milder form' of the US-based Klu Klux Klan...Respect Party leader George Galloway says. The DUP are known for their hard right positions which include creationism, anti-abortion and anti-LGBT views, as well as climate change denial."

In the UK, more than 2 million EU workers are non-citizens and cannot vote, despite paying taxes and filling Britain’s most precarious jobs. Brexit should be the moment that anomaly is ended

quote:

If Britain were to offer voting rights to all EU migrants who choose to settle here, it would remedy one of the biggest faults of the EU itself: its abstract and economic definition of citizenship.

The EU’s free movement rules effectively allowed employers to say to local populations: we don’t care who you are, what your father did, how much social capital your family has sunk into the building of a town and community, or that your grandad’s name is on the cenotaph: if a worker from Kraków can do the job better, she is hired.

The citizenship of the EU migrant resides effectively in their ability to work. They were treated as the classic “homo economicus” of neoliberal ideology. And UK-born workers – including black people and Asians – understood why: to create a two-tier exploitable workforce with reduced rights and an insignificant voice in politics.

Uniquely among recent waves of migration, EU workers were neither encouraged nor required to “integrate”. The ideal workforce for the low-wage, high-discipline, high-turnover employers who exploit them is one that cannot organise in trade unions and cannot make its voice heard in elections.

All across Britain, however, there are communities where a key symbol of successful integration is the high participation of minority communities in elections. Cities such as Leicester and Glasgow have seen their entire political dynamics reshaped by the entry of migrant communities into political party life and electoral activity. Why should that not now happen in a town such as Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, where 10,000 European nationals form about a third of the population?

Much of the same can be said in Canada with respect to the large number of residents who cannot vote.

I do not know how difficult it is to gain British Citizenship for EU residents. Many think that it is not unresaonable to say that you should make a committment to a country in the form of Citizenship to get this. In return that path to Citizenship ought to be accessible.

What is Citizenship? What rights should it confer? What rights ought full participants in the economy and lives of a community have? I thik this is a big question that we see here as well as we have geographical communities where a lower percentage of the people there have a say in decisions that affect them.

I ask the questions without clear answers. Personally, I find the notion of citizenship to be problematic. I have become over the years quite an internationalist and really see the collective problems of humanity on a global scale. I struggle with these questions for that reason.

Well, I suppose I could have been more clear and referred to "non-citizens" so as not to exclude Permanent Residents and such.

But you seemed to be suggesting that non-citizens should be allowed to vote, and you said that you "really see the collective problems of humanity on a global scale. ". Since the two ideas appeared to be connected somehow, I wondered how allowing a non-citizen to vote for Mayor was going to do anything about humanity's problems on that global scale you were talking about.

Well, I suppose I could have been more clear and referred to "non-citizens" so as not to exclude Permanent Residents and such.

But you seemed to be suggesting that non-citizens should be allowed to vote, and you said that you "really see the collective problems of humanity on a global scale. ". Since the two ideas appeared to be connected somehow, I wondered how allowing a non-citizen to vote for Mayor was going to do anything about humanity's problems on that global scale you were talking about.

You are connecting two very different points.

Permanent residents participate in society and there is a problem at any level when people who represent significant number of a community have no political say. There are places where there is less accountability becuase a large percentage of those living there are not citizens. That is not the same point as the comment I made about the larger political issues in the world being more global which I also think is the case.